A HISTORY OF ENGLISH IN TEN MINUTES.

August 24, 2013 at 11:42 PM · History

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH IN TEN MINUTES. A friend sent this animated history of English in ten minutes from the Open University. He is a wonderful cartoonist, and he admires the animation, and I do as well. The ten minute limit means that the words fly by very fast, providing a suggestion of how much English added new words. The examples also show how new words evoke changes in ways of life. For example, Anglo Saxon words for every day activities—such as “house” and “woman”—survived in English rather than their Latin equivalents.

I have posted, for example, here, about how place names show that Vikings settled in parts of England and lived peaceably with the natives. I was pleased to see that the animation points out that although the Vikings gave English the words “ransack”, “thrust”, and “die”, they also gave English the words “give” and “take”.